Shattered

The wooded roads of Dollar Bay, Michigan are about as upper as the Upper Peninsula gets, so Spring’s efforts at dispelling the frigid barrenness of winter go largely unnoticed until late in the season. On a cold afternoon, a solitary figure ambled home from school along the strip of dead, brown grass that separated the road from the tree line. Shuffling along, bent forward at the waist to ward off the piercing wind upon his face, the fifteen year-old boy gave off the appearance of a monk, his figure robed in a thick coat and heavy, dark jeans. The sun’s mocking glare belied a warmth that the chilly afternoon air did not afford.
Piercing blue eyes swept the path, inconsequentially marking each trudging step. His thoughts swept away from him, intermingling with the deadness of the air, and then plunged back again, skirting the depths of his moody, teenage ego. What did he find in there? The hazy innocence of a youth not long past? A burgeoning intelligence that was out of place in this backwater town? The harsh rebellion of a persecuted soul? It was too soon to tell; his thoughts strayed back outside, expelled like the steamy breath seeping out of his upturned jacket collar.

“A couple of kids jumped me,” Adam says to me plainly, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his chin nostalgically. “One of them broke my jaw with a baseball bat. My jaw still pops from it.” Seated comfortably in his barren office, I continue to listen to his story:

Across the road, he saw the wide expanse of russet grass that someday soon would become a baseball field once again. Dead tree branches crackled in the woods behind him. Startled out of his reverie, Adam instinctively turned to see what was causing the commotion.
There was no time for fear, no time for defense. The two boys scurrying out of the trees were bigger than him, and one wielded a long, thin-handled aluminum bat. Did the bully have time to say something clever? Adam would have. He was a smartass, and that was what made him a target: “Batter up!”
The bat swept through the air in an untrained arc, finding its target almost by accident. Adam’s jawbone snapped violently out of its place; inside his skull, the afternoon sun shattered into a mist of dazzling lights that blinded him from the pain. His knees buckled momentarily, before recovering his body to its full, if not significant, height. Darkness never descended, so Adam was able to see the stunned look on his attacker’s face.

“I think he couldn’t even believe what had happened. It was almost like it surprised him, so much so that he just dropped the bat. So I picked it up.”

He could taste the blood now. It poured into his mouth, seeping between his teeth, where the pain was beginning to localize. The two bigger boys stood dumbfounded, rooted to the dirty, dead grass as if they had forgotten why they had come. Lunging for the fallen weapon, Adam gripped its plastic-wrapped handle tightly. Fear had come and gone; the hatred of the hunter was now made insignificant in the face of the blind fury of the hunted’s revenge. Swinging the bat like a lumberjack hewing a tree, Adam crushed the side of the assailant’s chest, perhaps breaking the first ribs in that first hack. The squeals of pain did not deter him; again, and once more the bat came down as the once-bully crumpled to the ground. As if awakening from a daze, his companion lurched forward, throwing Adam back from his fallen comrade. Losing his balance, Adam finally toppled over, the bat rolling away into the underbrush. The previous moments’ rage and hostility spiraled down, down into a pinpoint of suddenly crystal-clear rationality: I have to get up. I have to get away.

“I was brought up on charges, but the judge dropped them, obviously because the kid broke my jaw first. He still ordered me to see a juvi officer, who recommended that I find a more constructive outlet for my aggression.”

When he managed to regain his feet, there was no sign of the two other boys except the muddy patch where the grass had been torn up by the sprawled body of Adam’s attacker. Turning to hurry homeward, his intention all along, the needling pains in his teeth exploded into a fire that consumed his entire skull. His eyes dulled, his ears closed off, and each step sent a wave of anguish through his loosely-hanging mandible. Behind the pain, though, Adam’s sharp intellect was reawakening, questioning: ‘What have I done?’

Small World

The familiar sound of Apt. 1’s deadbolt sliding back began the cordial conversation that I had with my neighbor Brandi. Her round face broke into an easy smile upon recognizing me, her eyes shining out from behind stylishly framed glasses with a look of bemused curiosity. Her five and a half foot frame was roundly filled out, though not to distressing proportions, and was clad in comfortable looking, though stylish, clothes. She was shorter than me, forced to look up to address me directly, yet there was no sense of inferiority in our engagement. Leaning in a bit, she listened politely as I stumbled through the particulars.

“So I have this assignment to do for my writing class,” I began, reeling off my pre-rehearsed spiel as she nodded sagaciously. Turns out she had taken a creative non-fiction writing class at St. Lawrence University, from which she graduated last year. Falling into easy conversation about her work, she struck me as exceedingly normal, the kind of person filling in the cracks in society between the weirdoes, degenerates, geniuses, and over-achievers. Her kindness did not seem to be rendered out of any sense of necessity or politeness, but came naturally as well.

“What is your last name?” I asked, feeling silly for having to ask my neighbor such a basic question. “Pestka,” she replied. Alarms of recognition sounded in my brain: “Are you related to Sherri and Don Pestka?” I inquired. “Yeah, they’re my parents.” Reddening, I couldn’t help but laugh. “They’re members at the gym where I work,” I explained, and she soon got to laughing herself. Despite the semi-dimness of her small nearly windowless apartment, I couldn’t help but feel that the entire room was filled with a warmth and comfort by this laugh, bouncing off the walls and filling the hallway where I leaned against the door frame. “What a small world,” she remarked. I couldn’t help but agree.

What They Don't... (Brevity)

This will be quick. I promise.

When I am given the assignment to write a paper, I don’t instantly seek out the minimum page requirement; instead, I check to see if there is a maximum. When assignments like “Analyze Aristotle’s use of the term ‘Substance’ in Categories and Metaphysics in a 4-5 page essay” or “In a 5-7 page essay, explain John Donne’s use of metaphor in three of his ‘Holy Sonnets’” are given out by a professor, my stomach instinctually knots itself as I question internally whether they are really serious about that upper limit or not. I can’t help myself. The pages inevitably stack up: A one page “reading response” written about a poem of no more than twelve lines suddenly becomes a three page mini-treatise on the metaphors for race in the closing stanza or the use of assonance in lines five through nine.

Now I could blame my propensity for prolixity on genetics (my father is notoriously long-winded, but that’s a story for another day), but what seems to be the root cause for my lack of brevity is in fact a fear of being misunderstood. Having never had a speech impediment, nor suffered under the weight of any learning disability, such a fear seems to have sprung from nowhere. My pattern of thought has only recently been complicated to the point of near absurdity by virtue of the higher education system, but this is neither here nor there, as I should, by the same token, still be able to say what needs to be said. But that’s not how it is: superfluous clarifications, the laying on of detail after detail, and a knee-jerk impulse to make every list of characteristics into a perfect set of three means that, where others nail their points in one shot, my words circle the rim timorously for pages and pages. The question of whether or not I am making any sense inspires an anxious verbosity, just as perching at the edge of a high-dive compels my knees to turn to Jell-O. My fear’s manifestations are evident even now: as I write these brief comments, I find myself squirming to avoid the short, simple statements of fact that would have rendered a succinct and concise essay upon my fear of being incomprehensible.


It seems to me that most fears people have are at base reasonably motivated: a fear of spiders brought on by the possibility of coming in contact with a Brown Recluse, a dread of high places incited by an understanding of gravity and density, or even a fear of crossing bridges brought on by a unseemly (though at least partially warranted) distrust in civil engineering. My own trepidation at being misunderstood seems just as rational as these in some sense; people who have speech impediments or have trouble putting words to their thoughts must suffer from such misgivings as well, but at least in their case they have good reason. The reality of their situation is completely lost on me; why my own fear is still manifested in spite of accolades from professors and peers for the high quality and clarity of my writing is a mystery worth investigating. The discontinuity of it certainly gives one food for thought…but that’s a story for another day.

Big

Shortly after I entered the world, my mother was wheeled on a gurney out into a hallway at St. Paul’s Midway Hospital in order to make way for another delivery. It wasn’t particularly distressing to her though; she was just glad to be in the air-conditioned hospital on a day my parents claim was the hottest they’d ever experienced. In reality, the entire drought summer of 1988 was sweltering, with temperatures peaking at 105 degrees in late July, not to mention the near-hundred percent humidity that saturated the air so much that you could have just as easily drank the air as breathed it. Eight blocks north of Midway, where the heat induced a massive spike in births, I came home to big two-story Victorian house that still had piping for gas lights sticking out of the walls. Needless to say there was no air-conditioning. There is no escaping such infernal weather without this modern life-saver; the nights are not cool enough to allow the house to bleed out some of the day’s fire. Instead, I was incubated for an extra three months, clothed only in diapers until the heat abated in late September.

Where does one escape such heat? Once, when I was about ten years old, my family visited my aunt and uncle in Milwaukee on a day when the temperature soared above one hundred. There house being about as old as ours and similarly lacking in the modern Midwestern necessity of air-conditioning, we were forced to retreat, to the great delight of my older brother and I, to a Holiday Inn, where we all gathered around the blasting industrial AC unit before taking a swim in the four foot deep hotel pool. That night we dined on Pizza Hut, delivered right to our room, and my brother and I stayed up late watching a movie on TNT while my parents shared a few rounds of Milwaukee’s most famous export with my relatives in the next room.

In middle school, long after moving to Oregon, where the dry heat of the summers was laughable by comparison, I passed long afternoons at the local YMCA with my friend Sven, whose name fit his brilliant blue eyes and cool Nordic temperament. We share memories from that summer that most of the kids I went to school with do: doing cannonballs into the deep end of the YMCA’s pool, carrying the ten pound rubber diving brick up from the bottom, testing to see how long we could sit beneath the ten feet of highly chlorinated water, all in the hour and a half each afternoon that that pool was deserted before an onslaught of young day-campers drove us out at 3:00. Our trips to the pool weren’t so much about getting out of the heat, as about not letting ourselves stew in the doldrums of an unstructured summer vacation. The years passed and our interests and circles of influence grew apart; Sven and I were never closer than in those many weeks in which we rode our bikes to the Y, stopping at a convenience store and buying up a few bucks’ worth of candy or ice cream on the way home.

I can’t deny the effect of the American movie industry upon my summer habits either. The “Summer Blockbuster” has been a staple in Hollywood for years, as the producers of these films reason that many people (especially those without air-conditioning in their homes) would seek refuge at their local cinema. The cool breeze billowing from the wall ducts is often more amenable to the fancy of movie-goers in the summertime than the films themselves.

The day I was born, June 3, 1988, the movie “Big” premiered to great critical acclaim and audience appeal. I would only come to know it from its presentation on TV, where “Big” has found its home on AMC in amongst the black and white Westerns and slap-stick comedies of the thirties and forties. The movie stars Tom Hanks, before his rise to superstardom with “Philadelphia Story” and “Forrest Gump,” and David Moscow, whose participation in the Disney musical “Newsies” had already made him familiar to me, as I had, by the age of seven or eight, seen that movie enough times to have every word in the script and every lyric in the songs memorized (by the accounts of others of my age, such an obsession was not uncommon). “Big” tells a story of a boy who wishes he could be big, grown-up, no longer subjected to the trials and tribulations of pre-teen adolescence. The next morning he wakes to find his outward appearance has been changed to that of thirty-year-old Tom Hanks, but he is still the same twelve-year-old boy on the inside. Hilarity ensues as he tries to navigate the adult world with the mentality of a kid, experiencing the pressures of work and his first romantic encounter with a woman. According to IMDB, the director first shot the entire movie with the young David Moscow performing Hanks’s entire role in order that the older actor could inhabit an accurate portrayal of his “younger self” in the real movie. What emerged from this was a great performance that really got to the heart of what it means to be a kid and what it means to be an adult.

Now, when I visit family, I don’t head into the next room to play with my cousins, or simply sit and watch TV while devouring Pizza Hut. I hardly ever go to the pool, except occasionally to swim laps when I’m feeling guilty about my eating habits. Summers are characterized by tedious work. As the unavoidable onrush of time has swept me up and carried me from that incubator of a house on Minnehaha Ave in St. Paul to the hallowed halls of Pacific University, I can’t help but feel that I, like Josh Baskin in “Big,” would choose to go back to being twelve if given the opportunity. While it would seem fair to sit back and marvel at my present condition, would it not be even more marvelous to go back and enjoy it once again?

Sources: IMDB, “GRAPHICAL CLIMATOLOGY OF MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL AREA TEMPERATURES, PRECIPITATION, AND SNOWFALL (1820-PRESENT)” by Charles Fisk < http://home.att.net/~minn_climo/>

Thingamajig

When I drop a quarter on the floor, I can’t just bend down and pick it up; my blunt, gnarled fingertips have had their nails whittled down by nervous chomping (a habit I can’t seem to shake), making it nearly impossible to grip the thin, ridged coin as it rests flatly on the ground. Usually, I resort to sliding a piece of paper underneath the coin, or, if there is no paper available, I’ll stubbornly press down on George Washington’s nose, trying to create enough leverage to lift the coin’s other side enough to peel it away from the floor. It’s not just coins of the floor though; counters, tables, dressers, any level surface inevitably leads to a vicious struggle between my half-eaten fingertips and the gravitational forces rooting the quarter.

I don’t remember exactly when, but sometime around the end of middle school my father presented me with a small, rectangular box, about twice as long as it was wide, with a bowed strip of linoleum somehow affixed to the inside of the wooden frame. To my adolescent mind it looked like a somewhat flattened half-pipe, the kind I saw Tony Hawk and Bob Burnquist skateboarding on every August during the X Games, only instead of the bland plywood of a skate ramp, flecks of gold sparkled in the faded cream band of flooring.

“What is it for?” I asked my dad, turning the thing over in my hands and examining its green felt-covered base. “You put your spare change in it. That way it’s easier to pick up,” he sagely replied. I rolled the box back over, setting it down on my dresser soundlessly, eyeing it once again, this time with its purpose in mind. It dawned on me as my dad reached into his pocket and drew out a couple of coins, placing them at the nadir of the linoleum half-pipe. “See,” he said, sliding the coins up the smooth sides to the edge, where they leapt into the waiting palm of his other hand. “Cool,” I drawled out, not unimpressed by the demonstration. “Yeah, your great-grandpa Sayers made it. He kept it on his dresser his whole life,” my dad said, loosing himself in a reverie while I gathered up the loose change scattered around my room in bottles and jars and oddly shaped banks (I’ve never owned a piggy bank; the closest thing to it is the miniature Red Cross ambulance with a coin slot in its roof that my grandfather gave me when I was little). As I began to load up the thingamajig with change, I couldn’t help but slide a few coins up the side, over the edge, and into my soft, child’s palm.

My great-grandfather Sayers (my grandmother’s father) was a farmer, with hard, coarse fingers that put in countless days in the humid Illinois summers plowing cornfields and sowing soybean crops. His family lived in a big two-story house, shaded to the north by the thick forest of oak and walnut trees that seems to sprout from the Rock River, a thick and luscious island of timber in a sea of rolling farmland. During the Great Depression, great-grandpa Sayers was able to whether the tough economic times by maintaining a vast acreage at minimal costs, generating maximum profit. My dad likes to say that my great-grandfather never bought any equipment new: his tractor was well beyond its prime, his plow was used, and he supposedly built a combine out of nothing more than a pile of spare parts and a diagram. Earl Sayers was above all things ingenious and innovative, able to repair the seemingly irreparable with junkyard parts and the boxes upon boxes of spare nuts and bolts he’d salvaged or saved from the discard pile at the steel mill across the river. Farming was a family affair, my great uncle Bud putting in long days in the fields, my dad and uncle spending their childhood fishing for hoses or rebar in the remains of what was once a dump not far from the property. My great-grandfather died in 1985, three years before I was born, victim of the cholesterol-ridden bacon, egg, and pancake breakfasts that fueled his day’s work, the pot-roast and mashed potato dinners, the thick, smelly cigars that were his favorite luxury. While he took to his grave his own love of economy and ingenuity, great-grandpa Sayers left the legacy of these values in his progeny. And in that thingamajig.

I’d be lying if I said that every time I slide a couple of nickels up the gold-flecked linoleum ramp I think about its maker. The simple genius of this small, convenient object I often taken for granted, its virtues no longer celebrated, but instead simply expected. Yet when I stop and think about it, I can’t help but picture a devilish smile, a cunning wink, a rightfully-exhibited pride on my great-grandfather’s face as he presents and demonstrates his invention. The sheer cleverness and quality of craftsmanship evident in this amalgamation of scrap is worthy of praise, as is the man who identified a problem and saw the potential for solving it in these diverse components.

Where have these men gone? It seems as though there is something ready-made for every situation, that innovation is relegated to gray-walled, low-ceilinged R & D departments at Sony, or Apple, or Brookstone. There are no “thingamajigs,” only “coin keepers,” pre-fabbed in particle board, or, for the high-end customer, plated with brushed nickel, available for $24.95 in the “crap-you-don’t-really-need-and-shouldn’t-really-be-spending-your-money-on-anyway” section of your local department store. Most of us would rather choose to live without something that makes gathering up our spare change easier than shell out for a little convenience (besides, who even carries coins around anymore?). But that’s not what really matters about great-grandpa Sayers’ linoleum coin ramp; what’s important about this family heirloom is not its usefulness, or even its role as an heirloom. In the end, the spirit of ingenuity, the desire and, above all, the ability to create solutions with the sweat of one’s brow, the skill of one’s touch, and the strength of one’s muscles, is what really counts. Disassociating oneself from the world by walling off problems with newfangled gadgets and excuses can never fulfill one quite like grabbing hold of a situation and contending with it. It’s not easy; hell, it’ll probably never be easy, but “easy” and “right” are often to very different things.

Truth in Advertising

“I saw something today that came close to truth in advertising: the DeBeers people are almost saying what they really mean, ’cuz the old DeBeers slogan was ‘Diamonds are forever,’ they changed it to ‘This year, take her breath away.’ The new slogan is ‘Diamonds: render her speechless.’ I mean, why don’t they just go ahead and say it: ‘Diamonds: that’ll shut her up!’” --Ron White

The field of advertising has always fascinated me because of its seemingly ambiguous nature. Whenever you see or hear an advertisement for a given product, you never get the whole truth; a company peddling its wares isn’t about to come right out and tell you all the possible flaws, the poor labor practices, or the more cost-effective alternatives to its merchandise. No, all that you’ll get from an ad is a laundry list of amazing advantages that you can experience when you make one of these things your own. The best kinds of advertisements can convey these benefits without bashing you over the head with them, instead subtly weaving them into an entertaining façade made of some snappy one-liners or an adorable cartoon. An ad for a diamond store would never come right out and say “Diamonds: that’ll shut her up,” even if their target audience is men seeking to subdue their over-talkative wives

Advertising is really nothing more than a condensed version of what we literary types call “Creative Non-Fiction.” Advertisers seek to convey truthful information to their audience in creative way in order to convince them to use a given service or buy a certain product. They need to be witty and artistic comes from the goal of being memorable: when Joe Six-Pack is standing in the beer aisle at the grocery store trying to make a decision, he’s probably going to rely at least in part upon the commercials he saw during last week’s Sunday Night Football game. Making sure that it is your advertisement that Joe remembers is the main goal of the creative process, because in the end, Budweiser and Miller taste pretty much the same.

When a writer sits down to create a memoir, or a personal essay, or to write a biography, they have a multitude of facts on hand from which they can pick and choose to craft a story with a very specific message. In order to keep the reader engaged and the story interesting, the writer might choose some quirky details that are not rely relevant to the central theme, but are good for at least a chuckle. However, in creating a piece of non-fiction, there is one single unbreakable rule: the story begins in reality. Whatever the author writes, they cannot forget that in order to qualify as non-fiction, their piece of writing has to be a truthful account of what really happened.

Of course, there are those that would argue that truth is relative, that in any given situation each person can glean their own version of truth based on their perspective. In this sense, what’s really “true” is incredibly hard to pin down: is there some single, perfect, universal version of the event that transpired that any person can understand? Or is it simply that whatever happens can only be known based upon each individual’s experience of it?

This question is simply too big to say one way or the other whether or not TRUTH (perfect, universal) exists in all cases; however, when it comes to writing a non-fiction story about one’s own personal experience, then truth is in fact subjective. The facts and details the writer has at their disposal is their own memory, and even if they choose to consult other participants in a given experience, they are still going to judge the validity of those peoples’ accounts based upon their own interpretation of what happened.

Advertising is ambiguous for this very reason: the truth that they want to convey to the average consumer is very subjective. Sure, there are a few fail-safes for the consumer: they can always buy whatever was advertised and find out it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, or word could come out through some thorough journalistic work that the product contains lead or was made by eight year-olds in Singaporean sweatshop. However, the majority of the time you’ve got to buy it before you find out its broken.

We have to put our trust in advertising, though, because how else are we supposed to find out anything about a given product? The FDA and Consumer Safety Boards can mandate types of labels all they want, but in the end it’s up to the companies to provide us with the full truth about their merchandise, something they may not really want to do, just as some writers are not ready to be entirely honest about their experiences. In either case, it is the spirit with which the author approaches a work that makes all the difference: if they are honestly endeavoring to provide something as close to (big T) Truth as they can manage, then we may let a few errors of memory slide. However, if the author is lax in their adherence to Truth, deliberately trying to skew their subject even from their own truthful memory, then they can hardly call themselves a creator of non-fiction.

White Noise (Bus Terminal, O'Hare International Airport)

“Hi there,” Holly said, in that tentative way she always starts a conversation with a stranger. “We bought tickets for a bus to Rockford online and we were wondering if we’re in the right place.” The woman behind the counter seemed friendly enough. “Yes, I’ll make an announcement when your bus arrives.” “Is this all we need,” said Holly, presenting the e-mail confirmation we’d printed last night, a world away. “Yes,” she replied cordially. “Thank you,” I said as we stepped away from the counter to take up our seats on the nearby wrought-iron benches.

“Where is the bus to Waukesha?” A hook-nosed woman leaned over the counter as if to intimidate an answer out of the unflappable attendant. The woman behind the desk did not cut an imposing figure, but her confidence and competence seemed to eschew out of every pore on her caramel-colored face. Her cheekbones glistened as she mildly pursed her lips, responding coolly: “I’ll make an announcement when your bus arrives.” The flustered woman’s beak bobbed up and down; “Ok, ok, ok thanks,” she crooned, moving away across the cluttered bus terminal, eyeing some distant seat like a hawk searching for prey.

The woman behind the desk had drawn out the day’s paper, the local section, and sat back in her swivel chair scanning the front page. There was something so familiar in the glazed look she had, the way she seemed to recline completely out of her workspace and fall back into the depths of her own concerns. She paused, coming out of her reverie to fold back the page, and then slouched back against the worn plastic backrest. Other customers came up to her, talking in hushed tones about when the next buses would be coming and going; the lady behind the counter would lean in and listen attentively, answering their questions over and over again: “Yes, I’ll make an announcement when your bus arrives,” “I’ll make an announcement when that bus is here,” “Yes, I’ll make an announcement.” In between, she would fade back into herself, carefully folding the paper back into its proper shape once she’d finished reading it, her fingers doing the work while her soul strayed.

A few paces away another young black woman was mopping the floors in the entryway between two sets of sliding glass doors. When she finished a section, she would pick up the yellow “caution: wet floor” sign standing near the doors and swing it back and forth, fanning the newly-clean floors dry. With each drop, the two halves of the sign would clack together, announcing the nadir of each swing with a sharp crack! In a calm, steady rhythm, she fanned the floor, each snap following in the drudgery this woman’s entire form seemed to embody. Back and forth she walked, clacking her sign, drying the floor, pausing indignantly when a traveler would pass through the doors, causing her to break her tuneful toil. I couldn’t help but think of the Christmas carol “Sleigh Ride,” as the sounds of the bus terminal jingled along punctuated by the whip-crack of the cleaning woman’s “wet floor” sign.

The woman behind the desk made her announcement: “Bus 572 to Rockford has arrived at door five. 572 to Rockford.” Holly and I gathered ourselves and stepped out into the cold Chicago afternoon. Rain came pelting down just on the other side of the protective overhang the bus’s passengers all crowded underneath. In a blazing orange jacket, the bus driver began to heave luggage into the cargo area. “Where you goin’ ma’am?” he said to the older woman in front of me. “Rockford,” she replied; the answer seemed obvious to her. “Yeah, but where? The Clocktower? Bus depot?” The driver had been obligated to explain this bus’s stopping points plenty of times, so this last question was delivered with the same cool impatience displayed by the woman behind the desk. Before the elderly woman could respond, the bus driver’s sunglasses seemed to flash, his whole face darkening. “Ma’am you cain’t do dat!” He barked at a woman who had just pushed her black Samsonite on top of the other luggage. The woman looked up, bewildered; the confused look on her face was the same one she’d had when she asked me if this was the bus to Rockford or not a few minutes before. “What?” she squeaked. “Dis’ doh coulda’ fell on yo’ head ma’am. Always let da bus driva’ do it, ok?” He pointed at the cargo bay’s door, which hung precariously on its worn hinges. “Oh, ok,” she said meekly, ashamed to be the center of attention. “Where you goin’ ma’am?” He repeated his mantra. “Clocktower?” “Actually, I’m going to the Holiday Inn,” she replied in a last attempt to be helpful. “See, dat makes a difference,” the driver said, his ebony face contorting into a half-smirk, half-smile that clearly demonstrated his feelings towards the unwieldy passenger. He hefted her bag up out of its temporary nest and hurled it into the aft-most section of the cargo area. “Where you goin’ ma’am?” he said again to the older lady, who had been patiently waiting. “The clocktower,” she replied, and he whisked her bag into the appropriate section of the luggage compartment. I pushed the single piece of luggage Holly and I had packed for the trip up to the curb. “I’m going to the clocktower too,” I told him. “Well awright,” he said as soon as he my destination. Before I’d even finished my final syllable our suitcase had been launched into the bus. “Thank you sir,” I said, in that matter-of-fact way it always seems to come out. “Where you goin’ sir?” He had already moved on to the next passenger in line.

My Father's Knees

I have my father’s knees. His cinder-block calves still dwarf mine to this day, his thighs lack the definition I’ve gained through years of playing sports, but the thick ligaments and round, heavy kneecaps in between are the same. We share a distinctively wide patella covered by a tough, wrinkly patch of hardened skin, as well as the same odd bulge where the lower end of the quadriceps interjects onto the inside part of the knee’s upper half. There are other similarities to be sure, but our knees, those God made carbon copies of one another.

***

My family celebrated my eighth birthday by taking a camping trip to Clear Lake, high in the Cascades. It was my first visit to this marvel of nature, where the water (supplied by melted snow-pack and purified by the lava rock from which the lake itself is carved) could yield a crystal-clear view of submerged tree trunks and fish eighty or a hundred feet down. The views of the mountains, the lake itself, and the lush, thick forest we were surrounded by were all marvelous, but my attentions throughout the trip were with a small manmade object my parents stashed underneath the small stack of firewood. I had been clearly instructed not to touch the hatchet, nor to use it to chop anything (especially my brother). On the final day of the trip, however, while my family was distracted with making preparations to leave, I snuck the hatchet out from under the woodpile and began to carefully hack at a gigantic stump just outside of my parents’ eye-line. Whack! I drove the hatchet down into the wood, watching it cleave a thick wedge out of the bark. Up again, arms outstretched above my head, then Whack! I pierced the stump again and again, using both hands, then one hand, perfecting my technique so that I could chop wood ambidextrously. A steady rhythm of muffled thuds crept away from me through the forest, my undeveloped arms not yet capable of delivering a loud, ringing death blow. I hacked away at the stump, circling it, pounding it again and again, until the hatchet came swinging down and there was no whack. I looked down from my intended target to find the hatchet’s blade slicing into my right knee, my arm stopping its course in slow motion. Too late I heeded my parents’ warning and dropped the weapon, neither screaming nor crying, but simply staring as the small, thick line began to ooze crimson. I had the presence of mind to put the hatchet back in its place and concoct a brilliantly foolish story about falling and cutting myself on a lava rock before approaching my parents, a river of blood now pouring down my calf. “Mom,” I said calmly, fighting back the pain and humiliation lurking in the back of my throat. “Mom, I think we need to go to the hospital.”

The nearest hospital was at home in Eugene, so my parents drove me there. I told the doctor in Urgent Care that I’d fallen, and he stitched up the one-inch laceration on the inside part of my knee after cleaning the wound and finding (believe it or not) not a single sign of lava rock. I wear the thick scar to this day, though its ghastly purplish hue has toned down some in the intervening years. The stupidity, the wound, the scar, those are mine; the knee is still my father’s.

***

One cloudy February afternoon, the soggy kind that Eugene is prone to, my baseball team was practicing squeeze bunts on the turf field we used during the winter months. The pitcher would lob a ball towards the plate, a coach would roll a ball out onto the field to simulate the bunt, and the runner on third would try to score successfully. As the catcher, it was my duty to tell the fielders if we had a viable chance of getting the runner out at home. The tall lanky freshman pitcher tossed in a pitch, my red-haired teammate Chase took off from third, playing the part of the runner, and the coach who stood beside me rolled a hard grounder down the third-base line. Chase came on like a steam engine, but his huffing and puffing was drowned out by my hoarse shouting, “Four! Four! Four!” The third baseman fielded the ball cleanly, expertly flipping it from glove to bare hand. His crisp throw sent the ball into the hard leather of my catcher’s mitt with a sharp Whack! I dropped onto my knees, barricading the precious plate as Chase recognized he’d been beat. His foot cranked up underneath him as he careened into a hard slide towards my left side in a last ditch effort to slip past. I locked out my knee, extending my leg to its full length, and caught his upturned cleats with my shin guard. My leg didn’t move, but my knee certainly did, wrenching over sideways and sending a signal of agony that was entirely unique in my experience. There was no momentary numbness, no presence of mind; I simply crumpled over backwards, my eyes welling with tears. Chase helped me to the trainer’s room where I was told that, though I hadn’t torn anything, I would certainly need to stay off of my left knee for at least a week.

During the next season I started to wear thick neoprene braces on both of my knees (the left’s was thicker) whenever I would play any sports. The braces slowed me down a little when I’d play racquetball with my best friend, though I still managed to beat him plenty of times. Baseball had developed my right arm into a powerful weapon, especially on the racquetball court, where I could out-hit him by a wide margin, even if I couldn’t outrun him. I remember once crashing my knee into one of the hard concrete walls at full speed while making a play on a hard hit ball. Whack! I cranked the forehand shot into the opposite corner just before meeting with the immovable object that was to stop my forward momentum. I fell to the ground and writhed around in pain until the burning daggers retreated and allowed the dull, ever-present throbbing to resume its duties. I wouldn’t stop playing though; the love of these games, and the camaraderie that came with them is mine; but my knees, those are still my father’s.

***

Sometimes when I would lay awake at night, I could here my dad’s heavy footfalls on the stairs just outside my room, the creaking of each step punctuated by a pop or crack like that of a dried twig snapping in your hands. He’d reach the top of the stairs and the pops would fade away as he passed by my door, moseying down the hallway to bed. One day, after years of hearing these familiar sounds, I was caught off guard when, while climbing to the second floor of my high school in a deserted stairwell, I recognized the echoing sound of twigs snapping. I paused, then shifted my weight onto the next step. Though no sound came, I felt my knee creak like an old rocking chair sitting on top of worn floorboards. I took the next step, my left leg creaking this time, the feeling building in my mind until it burst forth as a sharp crack that rang off the stairwell’s concrete walls. I stepped again, and again, until I’d reached the next floor, the cacophony of pops still ringing in my head. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself: my dad, the professor, had skipped out on PE because he didn’t like sports, learned the game of baseball from a book for his sons’ sakes, and has knees that crackle like a bag of popcorn. Believe it or not, I have my father’s knees.

The One Minute I Regret Most

The empty two liter bottle stood naked, without its Diet Pepsi label or royal blue cap, prayerfully awaiting its execution. Fifteen paces of cropped, sun-bleached grass separated the victim from the tips of my Nike running shoes. “Here you go. Safety’s on,” said Bernie, handing me the Sig-Sauer. I took the pistol delicately, too delicately for such a masculine exchange. Such caution wasn’t allowed in front of my future father-in-law, who had finished casually blasting a Coke bottle to smithereens with a jauntily aimed .357 snub-nosed revolver. I shook my head, clearing out any fear as the fingers of my right hand closed confidently around the grip of the Sig. My left painted greasy sweat marks on the slide as I pulled it back, cocking the weapon’s hammer into the firing position. Slightly adjusting my stance, I raised the gun to eye level, simultaneously clicking the safety off with my right thumb.

A warm July breeze caused the bottle to shudder on the uneven ground of my in-laws’ pasture. Bernie stood beside me with a mostly empty can of Coors gripped wistfully in his left hand, the smoldering .357 hanging from his right, his eyes locked on my intended target. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, wondering if I would be able to impress him with a clean kill on the first shot. I had a knack with guns, a sort of natural talent that I had never discovered until, at the age of 15, one of my uncles took me to a firing range, put a 30.06 in my hand and said, “Let’s give it a shot.” On that day I hit a six inch wide paper plate rapped in aluminum foil from 200 yards with a rifle that had been manufactured forty years before I’d even been born. I hit the plate four times in a row, standing awkwardly with the heavy weapon weighing down my underdeveloped arms, the large industrial earmuffs making it nearly impossible to line my right eye up with tiny glass circle that was the rifle’s sight. On this July day, however, two years and a few hundred rounds later, I wasn’t encumbered by such inconveniences. I had assumed a well-practiced half-turned stance, easily held the pistol steady at arms length, and buried my chin in my right shoulder so that my good eye (the left one oddly enough) lined up with the gun’s irons. The gentle breeze ruffled my t-shirt and I saw the bottle shiver once more, this time as I aligned the three pieces of the gun’s sights just below the bottle’s middle. With a slight correction to compensate for my right-handed trigger pull, I had come to the moment of truth. My worries about Bernie’s reaction, the bottle’s seeming unwillingness to hold still, my unconventional firing position no longer mattered as the entirety of my mind concentrated on the musculature that would depress the Sig’s trigger.

The instinctive flinch that accompanies any loud noise can be tempered with practice, but such a roar as this weapon made shattered any habituated steadiness that I may have possessed. My eyes slammed shut in the millisecond it took the rather large bullet to escape the pistol’s barrel, its shell casing cartwheeling out of the breech, and travel the fifteen short yards to the bottle’s right side. As my eyes slammed back open, so too did the bullet careen into and through the Diet Pepsi bottle, which, despite having a large portion of its upper half removed in a single split-second, refused to topple over backwards. It stood perfectly still, a stillness that possessed me as well, enabling my arms to grow steadier, my mind to quickly calculate the position upon which I would place my sights, my finger to delicately apply the needed force to release the weapon’s hammer and hurl a second volley into the proud bottle. This time there was no flinch; neither was there a roar. The bottle was caught square in its middle, toppling backwards this time as the bullet ripped straight through, nearly cleaving its victim in two. Seeing my quarry fall, I moved to finish it off with a bang. Aiming slightly lower, I fired a third and final time, my arm’s absorption of the recoil the only sensation I seemed to feel. The bottle was hit in its upturned base near to the ground, the large caliber bullet causing the earth beneath it to jump up and hurl the bottle in a high arcing spiral to its final resting place a couple of feet away.

I unknotted my shoulders, lowering the volatile weapon and quickly engaging the safety. Bernie turned to me and said, “Mmm hmm umm hmm mmmm.” I saw the smile on his face, recognized the approval in his dancing eyes, but could not make out a word. I cocked my head to the left so that he spoke directly into my right ear. “You want to try the .357?” I nodded, trading pistols with him in a daze. It dawned on me that because of the odd position I had placed my head in to be able to aim with my left eye, my left ear had also been pointed directly towards the bellow of the Sig Sauer. When the first shot had gone off, my left eardrum was torn apart by the powerful waves of sound emanating from that twice deadly weapon.

I had not been wearing the oversized earmuffs my uncle had mandated on the firing range. I had perforated an ear drum, resulting in temporary hearing loss and permanent hearing deficiency in my left ear. I had nearly killed one of my most valuable senses executing a plastic bottle to impress a man who already loved me like a son. The high pitched squeal in my left ear that attends every silent moment tells me these facts. My own regret does the rest.

Hi, I'm a Little Bit Country

I feel the rhythm of city living every night when I go to bed: the light from the street lamp that sings between thin plastic blinds; the brassy wailing of fire engines’ horns; the smooth tenor of police sirens accented by the roar of a Crown Vic’s V8; the pitchy soprano of the twittering ambulances; the diesel monster trucks rumbling by. They all mingle together to form an insipid chorus barring any possibility of sleep…for a moment anyway. Then silence, and I remember that Forest Grove is a sleepy little town, just on the suburban side of “boondocks” qualification. It’s not that much different from Rock Falls, Illinois, another quaint little village built up by farmers and folks looking to stake their own claim in life, where my dad, and his dad, and his dad’s dad, were all born and raised. It’s a place where I’ve always dreamed of settling down, carrying on the family legacy of good old-fashioned hard work, ingenuity, and small town living that delivered a joyful and prosperous life to my grandparents and propelled my father to get the hell away as fast as he could.

My dad is no farmer. He’s certainly not a steel mill man (though it wouldn’t much matter now since the mill in Rock Falls has been closed for decades). He demonstrated this clearly when, during the summer after high school he spent working in the wire-fence section of that factory, he chose to pass his breaks out on the loading dock with a book, instead of sharing a smoke with the other men in his crew. The next summer my father wasn’t hired because his foreman had given him a poor review, citing as his chief complaint the fact that he “read too damn much.”

So it’s easy to see why my dad might try to find any way possible to escape such a suffocating town. He married my mother while they were both still in college, and the two of them made out pretty well in a series of jobs in and around universities in Wisconsin and eventually Minnesota until my older brother and I came along, cementing our family into a nice community in St. Paul, Minnesota. My dad went back to school for his PhD in philosophy, my mom worked for some big insurance company, and my brother and I beat up on each other (it was cold and we were indoors a lot). I rode the bus to school, I had friends on the block, and I could see skyscrapers from the park just up the street. It was city living at its finest, without all the crime, smog, or filth that normally comes with it, and I thrived on it.

Yet most of my favorite childhood memories involve time spent not in St. Paul, but Rock Falls: bouncing around in the little red trailer my grandfather towed behind his John Deere mower as we cleared brush or moved dirt; daring my brother to touch the electric fence the neighbors used to keep their horses in the pasture; hitting walnuts with fifty-year-old baseball bats into the cornfield less than a hundred yards from my grandparents’ house. After hearty dinners I heard amazing tales of my grandfather’s exploits during his childhood in the Great Depression, old war stories about Korea, anecdotes from my grandmother’s days in teaching…anything and everything that I could soak up during my time in Rock Falls I tried to hold on to, even as my life continued during the week back at home.

Our family moved to Eugene, Oregon when I was only seven, making visits to Illinois a rarer occurrence even as I was entering my most formative years. As I experienced the homeless veterans, smelly hippies, and ne’er-do-well college students that plague Eugene, Rock Falls became an idyllic place that I refused to let go of. I can’t say that I wasn’t changed by years of city living; I’m just as plugged in, tech savvy, and text-message happy as any other twenty-year-old. And I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing. The truth of the matter is, though, I’m still a little bit country after all these years, if only so that I remember where I come from, what I’m here for, and how I can achieve the happiness that we all so desperately seek. My answer lies about two hours west of Chicago down I-88, where generations of my family created success and happiness through the cardinal virtues of hard work, discipline, ingenuity, and love, virtues I hope to carry with me for the rest of my journey through life.